Historian of Sex, Reproduction, and Women's Health in America

Category Archives: pregnancy

In childbirth politics as in all politics, extreme viewpoints make the news, and sensible centrists are ignored. A couple of years ago, Ricki Lake provoked a firestorm of debate about home birth with her film, The Business of Being Born, which showcased gloriously crunchy New York City home births, and made the case for the home birth option. Obstetricians responded with censorious anger, shouting at Lake via condescending statements from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Recently, obstetrician and blogger Amy Tuteur published Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting, in which she made fun of women stupid enough to believe that they might have a better birth experience without an epidural, and excoriated anyone who would refuse any of the bells and whistles of modern obstetrics. Her title was a response to journalist Jennifer Block’s, Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, an exposé of callous obstetricians who damaged women and their babies with the thoughtless overuse of standard obstetric interventions such as the induction agent cytotec and the drastic overuse of major abdominal surgery (cesarean section).

All this shouting. Is it getting us anywhere? Mightn’t there be some middle path for women who see the appeal of “natural” birth, or who at least would like to minimize their chances of cesarean section, but who are not confident about giving birth without immediate medical back-up?1 Could there possibly be a way to combine the emergency backstop of modern medicine with the caring values of home-birth midwifery?…

“What makes a mother real?” asks writer and performer Alice Eve Cohen in her newly-published play, What I Thought I Knew. In 1999, Cohen experienced the most improbably and bizarrely complicated pregnancy imaginable. Her play is a crystallization of her stranger-than-fiction pregnancy memoir that was acclaimed at its 2009 publication with book-of-the-year awards from Salon to Oprah. Cohen’s saga touches on an amazing range of twentieth-century reproductive history and politics, from the birth defects caused by the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES) prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950s, to surgical approaches to intersex, to “wrongful life” litigation. Through it all, she never lets her audience rest on their assumptions about motherhood…

The Indiana legislature claims it wants to protect unborn children and their parents. Last week Governor Mike Pence gave his blessing to a new bill aimed primarily at restricting abortion but also addressing miscarriage, explaining, “I sign this legislation with a prayer that God would continue to bless these precious children, mothers and families.” But knowing what I do about pregnancy and miscarriage, all I can see is increased pain and confusion in store for women who lose pregnancies in Indiana…

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing historian Jessica Martucci at length about her new book, Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America. We discussed the Mommy Wars, the politics of pumping, and the importance of playing devil’s advocate with lactivists and skeptics alike. What follows is a snippet of our conversation about La Leche League, a grassroots breastfeeding support and advocacy group that began in 1956 and quickly grew into a nationwide network for breastfeeding peer counseling and activism. In recent decades, La Leche has found itself in conflict with many second-wave feminists over its stance against mothers working, and has often been cast as a major player on the conservative “side” of the Mommy Wars.

Lara: Throughout the book I was intrigued with your treatment of La Leche League. They’re such a powerful piece of this history. They are so important. They have supported so many women, and have also been a difficult ideological thorn in the side of many women over the years. They have succeeded as an organization in a way that I think the founders never pictured. I’m interested in your experience researching them. Where was their archive? What was that like, to go find them and learn more about their history?…

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg joyfully announced on Facebook that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are expecting a daughter. More solemnly, he added that Chan had experienced three miscarriages before this pregnancy. He shared this personal story as a gesture of support and solidarity with other couples facing similar difficulties. It had meant a lot to him when his friends who had struggled to have children shared their experiences, and now it was his turn.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook post sparked an outpouring of tens of thousands of congratulatory messages, including a remarkable number of miscarriage stories. There is a real hunger for this kind of sharing.

Why are we eager for new ways to commiserate over our experiences of early pregnancy loss? Is this an expression of a long-suppressed need? Or has something about the experience of pregnancy changed?

As a historian, I see many ways in which dramatic, mostly-positive social changes of the past two centuries have had unintended consequences when it comes to early pregnancy loss…

It seems like every day a new health tracking gizmo appears in stores. The fitbit. The Apple Watch. TICKRx. Leaf, a tracker that’s advertised as “for women” because it’s a fitbit copycat shaped like a piece of jewelry. But are any of these really that special? Do any of them really understand what women need?

No! And that’s why I am developing an innovative and unique health tracker, exclusively for the self-aware, self-care-oriented woman.

It’s time to write about naked dancing again. I didn’t plan this theme, honest. But the modern dance world keeps pushing me there, with intriguing insights into how we experience our bodies: as women and men, as people of a certain age, and this time, as mothers. Specifically, women who have been pregnant.

Friday night, my husband and I kissed our kids goodnight, gave the sitter some instructions, and hopped in the car to drive a half hour to a different New Jersey suburb. Montclair State University, in the leafy, affluent town of Montclair, has an innovative dance program and a wonderful theater. I anticipated a sophisticated and beautiful performance.

Alexander Kasser Theater

Still, when I go to a concert in the ‘burbs, I expect something tame and mainstream. An artist might claim to “challenge the boundaries,” but they are generally boundaries that were knocked down a few decades ago in nearby New York City, and the artist is tapping at the ancient ruins of walls left partly standing in more conservative quarters.

Not Friday night. Reka Szabo had arrived from Budapest, to show me something I had never seen before. In a piece called Apropos, she chatted with the audience, she “broke the fourth wall,” she dribbled confetti from her pockets as she ran to a fake door at the back of the stage, and repeatedly declined to answer mysterious knocks. She brushed her fake hair while she recited quirky personal ads, until the hair was pulled out and strewn all over the stage, and she appeared bald. (That’s not the new part, yet. I was part of the San Francisco dance scene for quite a while, and I’ve seen a lot of experimental dance theater.)

But then, she walked to the edge of the stage, lifted her shirt and tugged her yoga pants so that we could see her abdomen. A spotlight shone on her belly. And it was the belly of a woman who has been pregnant, the skin that has been stretched taut around a watermelon and then abruptly released.

My friends and I call it the “baby pouch.” After the baby is out, after the pregnancy weight is gone, and the abdominal wall separation has healed, the loose skin remains. A dancer can do as much Pilates as she likes, she can be stronger than ever, with an enviable 6-pack. But the baby pouch is a permanent marker of the incredibly physical labor her body has done, growing a new person.

Szabo placed her hands on her belly in the shape of a heart, pushing the loose skin together and out. And then she performed several minutes of a dance, with just her hands and that loose skin. She made the hand-heart beat, pushing it in and out with incredibly strong and supple abdominal muscles. She made lips that kissed, and lines and whirls that flowed between shapes.

I have to admit, part of me cringed. “Isn’t that going to just make is worse?” I thought. I had accepted my own baby pouch with sad resignation. Two babies had stretched it plenty; I would never deliberately stretch it more.

But at the same time, I felt so proud of her, and myself by extension. She took something most of us try to hide, to pretend never happened, and made a beautiful dance out of it. A dance about love for her daughter, with hearts and kisses. She saw the possibility, and the uniqueness, in her baby pouch. She couldn’t have done that dance until she had carried a baby. It was a defiant choice. Not, “I can dance as well as a young person who hasn’t had babies. I can hide the evidence.” Instead she said, “I can do something you young ones, with your perfect, innocent bodies, cannot do. My love is marked on my body, and I can dance with it. Motherhood has given my body more possibilities.”

I felt it with her. I suddenly saw my body differently. I’ll probably still joke about my “baby pouch,” but I don’t rue it the same way, after that performance. I doubt I’ll emulate her choreography, but now I have a way to see the evidence of my pregnancies as an addition to my body, not a diminishing of it. Not a mark of sacrifice, but a hard-won transformation.

So am I saying exactly the opposite of what I said about Dandelion Dancetheater’s naked piece? After all, I claimed that in that choreography, seeing a variety of nude bodies had showed me that women’s and men’s bodies are not so different after all. But I saw Szabo’s body as marked specifically and irrevocably by motherhood.

This is where the rest of the piece matters. I have highlighted the baby pouch dance, but Szabo contextualized it with many stories and dances about mothering, about creating artistic work, and about being 44 years old. A bit further into the performance, she had taken off all her clothes, and did several minutes of dramatically lit, very intense yoga in the nude. In my eyes, she morphed back and forth between being an incredibly fit 44-year-old dancer-mother and an otherworldly being, writhing somewhere between life and death, awaiting the resurrection that concluded the piece. The loose belly skin meant something one moment, and didn’t the next.

Motherhood is marked on my body. It can matter at one moment, and barely register the next. It is a resource: of experience, of movement quality, of literal physicality. It is mine, to use how I want. We are all movement artists, even if only some of us are professional dancers. My body’s expressive possibilities grow with the years. The pliability and buoyancy of youth are not everything, even for dancers, as Szabo so eloquently demonstrated. For those of us who have borne children, our maternity does not need to be what our bodies are solely or primarily about, but it will always be there for us.